Marshall Plan Modernism
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NOTES Introduction 1. From Fontana’s journal Il Gesto 1 (June 1955), Lucio Fontana Archives, Milan. Fontana’s fascination with atomic age technologies and his horror at its greatest actu- alizations to date in Nagasaki and Hiroshima appear throughout his published texts, as well as in his correspondence. The opening text of the first issue of Il Gesto questions the validity and viability of traditional media in the atomic age. See also Fontana’s frequent collaborators’ writing on the relationship between painting and history in the atomic era in the same issue. Enrico Baj and Sergio Dangelo, “Manifesto of Nuclear Painting,” reprinted in The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943–1968, ed. Germano Celant (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1995), 716–717. The Fondazione Lucio Fontana has verified the statement with the author. 2. For the most thorough analysis of Pollock’s idiom as a hard-won synthesis of the European prewar and Mexican avant-gardes, see Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Uncon- scious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). 3. Lucio Fontana interview, Metro Alfieri (Milan) 7 (June 1962): 24–27. The interview was conducted by Jacques Kermoal, and published in French. All translations are mine. 4. I owe this prognosis, wherein Pollock’s tremendous global success reflects the global success of the American petit bourgeoisie, to T. J. Clark’s analysis of Pollock’s, and ultimately abstract expressionism’s, reception. See “The Unhappy Consciousness” and “In Defense of Abstract Expressionism,” in Farewell to an Idea (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 299–370 and 371–404, respectively. 5. Nicola Pizzolato, Challenging Global Capitalism: Labor Migration, Radical Struggle, and Urban Change in Detroit and Turin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 6. Potere Operaio. (1973). Cited in Nicola Pizzolato. Challenging Global Capitalism.